In recent years the Internet and other similar information communication networks have advanced and a cellular phone or the like is used for a personal terminal to allow the user to readily access network information.
In such information communication a digital signal is used to transmit information. As such, if a user copies music, video information or the like transmitted on such an information communication network as described above, each individual user can copy such information almost free of significant degradation in the quality of sound, image and the like.
Thus, if music information, image information or other similar works in copyright is transmitted on such an information communication network without any appropriate approach taken to protect the copyright, the copyright owner may have his/her right infringed significantly.
However, prioritizing copyright protection and preventing content data distribution on a rapidly expanding digital information communication work, is disadvantageous to copyright owners, who basically can collect a predetermined copyright fee for copying copyrighted works.
When an individual user receives music data or other similar copyrighted information distributed on such a digital information network as described above the user would record and thus hold the distributed content data in some form of recording medium.
Such a recording medium is for example a memory card or other similar, electrically data writable and erasable media.
In this case if such distributed content data as music data can be transferred from the recording medium of interest to another recording medium, as desired, without the copyright owner's permission the copyright owner's right cannot be protected.
Furthermore, if an individual other than a user having made payment in due course and thus received and stored distributed content data to a recording medium, can reproduce music data or the like from the recording medium or transfer and erase content data, as desired, the user's right would also not be protected.